The Tribunal has decided my appeal and the order has a mistake in it — it overlooked a judgment we had filed, and one figure is simply wrong. Can I get that fixed without going to the High Court, and how long have I got?
Section 254(2) lets the Appellate Tribunal amend an order it has passed under section 254(1) to rectify a mistake apparent from the record, on its own or when the mistake is pointed out by you or by the Assessing Officer. Since 1 June 2016 the application must be made within six months from the end of the month in which the order was passed — before that the period was four years — and the Tribunal has no power to condone a delay, so the six months is a hard edge in a way the sixty days for an appeal under section 253 is not. The power is to rectify, not to review: an obvious and patent error can go, a conclusion you disagree with cannot, and the Supreme Court in Reliance Telecom set aside a recall where the Tribunal had used section 254(2) to rehear the appeal on merits. Where a binding decision was placed before the Tribunal and it was overlooked, that is a mistake apparent — Honda Siel — and the Tribunal may recall the order, in part or in whole, to put the prejudice right. A miscellaneous application does not stop the 120-day clock for an appeal to the High Court under section 260A, so in anything serious you file both.
Section 254(2) is a narrow repair power. As it stands today on the department's own text of the section, the Appellate Tribunal may, at any time within six months from the end of the month in which the order was passed, with a view to rectifying any mistake apparent from the record, amend any order passed by it under sub-section (1), and shall make such amendment if the mistake is brought to its notice by the assessee or the Assessing Officer. Two provisos follow. An amendment that would enhance an assessment, reduce a refund or otherwise increase your liability cannot be made unless the Tribunal has given you notice of its intention and a reasonable opportunity of being heard. And an application filed by an assessee on or after 1 October 1998 must be accompanied by a fee of fifty rupees. Note what the power attaches to: an order passed under sub-section (1), that is, the order disposing of the appeal. In practice the application is filed as a miscellaneous application in the disposed appeal, and the number it carries is an M.A. number, not a fresh appeal number.
The time limit has been cut. Until 31 May 2016 the words were "four years from the date of the order". The Finance Act 2016 substituted "six months from the end of the month in which the order was passed" with effect from 1 June 2016 — the substitution and that date are carried in the footnote to the section as the Jharkhand High Court reproduced it in Kamal Nayan Singh, and the same Act recast the connected time limits in section 153 with effect from the same day. The Supreme Court in Sree Ayyanar Spinning and Weaving Mills read the sub-section as having two parts: the Tribunal's own power to rectify within the period, and its duty to amend when the mistake is brought to its notice by you or by the Assessing Officer. What matters, that Court held, is the date the application is made, not the date it is disposed of; a Tribunal that sits on an application filed in time cannot then reject it as time-barred because it took its own time. Under the Income-tax Act 2025, section 363(2) carries the same six-month period forward for orders passed under that Act, though it is drafted as a single sentence — the Tribunal may amend an order passed under sub-section (1) within six months from the end of the month in which the order was passed if the mistake is brought to its notice by the assessee or the Assessing Officer — and does not reproduce the two-limb structure of the 1961 provision that Sree Ayyanar was construing.
When does the six months start? The statutory words point at the order: six months from the end of the month in which the order was passed. The High Courts that have decided the point have read a further step into it. The Delhi High Court in Golden Times Services, on 13 January 2020, held that the starting point "has to commence from the date of the actual receipt of the judgment and order", and repeated the point in Pacific Projects on 23 December 2020, saying that an order passed without the knowledge of the aggrieved party "would render the remedy against the order meaningless". The Bombay High Court followed both in Accost Media LLP on 1 December 2025, holding that "the date of communication or knowledge, actual or constructive, of the orders sought to be rectified or amended under section 254(2) of the Act becomes critical and determinative for the commencement of the period of limitation", and adding that it is impossible to apply to the Tribunal without having been supplied a copy of its order.
Accost Media shows what the difference is worth. The Tribunal's order was passed on 10 December 2024, reached the assessee on 24 March 2025, and the miscellaneous application was filed on 16 July 2025. The judgment fixes no expiry date; what it records is that the Registry of the Tribunal sent the assessee a notice that the application was belated by fifteen days. Work the two rules and you can see where those fifteen days come from. On the statutory mechanism the period runs from the end of the month in which the order was passed, that is from 31 December 2024, and on that count the application was a fortnight late. On the reading the Court adopted the period is measured from when the order actually reached him on 24 March 2025, and on that count 16 July 2025 is comfortably inside it however you handle the end-of-month step — Golden Times speaks of "the date of the actual receipt", the statute of the end of the month, and either gives him until late September. Both of those computations are the page's, not the Court's. Note also what the assessee got, because it is not what he asked for: the Court did not restore the miscellaneous application to the Tribunal. It disposed of the writ petition by keeping all his grounds on the merits open in the appeal under section 260A he had already filed against the order of 10 December 2024. He was saved by the appeal, not by the rectification.
"Mistake apparent from the record" is the whole of the jurisdiction. The Supreme Court's test, given in T.S. Balaram v Volkart Brothers on section 154 and applied to section 254(2) ever since, is that a mistake apparent on the record "must be an obvious and patent mistake and not something which can be established by a long drawn process of reasoning on points on which there may conceivably be two opinions". The Bombay High Court put the corollary in Ramesh Electric and Trading in 1992: the Tribunal has no power to review its own orders, its only power is to rectify a mistake apparent from the record, and "failure by the Tribunal to consider an argument advanced by either party for arriving at a conclusion is not an error apparent on the record, although it may be an error of judgment". A wrong date, a figure transposed, an assessment year mis-stated, a finding recorded against a party on a ground nobody argued, an internal contradiction between two paragraphs of the same order — those are the kind of things the sub-section is for. The line between rectification and review is where most applications die, and the Supreme Court settled it in Reliance Telecom on 3 December 2021. The Tribunal had passed a detailed reasoned order in 2013 and then, on a miscellaneous application, recalled it. The Court held that "the powers under Section 254(2) of the Act are only to correct and/or rectify the mistake apparent from the record and not beyond that", that they "are akin to Order XLVII Rule 1 CPC", and that what the Tribunal had in fact done was to re-hear "the entire appeal on merits as if the ITAT was deciding the appeal against the order passed by the C.I.T.". It set aside both the recall order and the High Court's judgment, restored the original order, and said that if the assessee thought the order was wrong on facts or in law "the only remedy available to the Assessee was to prefer the appeal before the High Court". Read it for what it decided: a recall used as a vehicle for a rehearing is outside the sub-section. It is not authority that the Tribunal may never recall an order.
Non-consideration of a binding precedent that was cited to the Tribunal is a mistake apparent. That is Honda Siel Power Products, decided by the Supreme Court on 26 November 2007. A coordinate bench decision had been placed before the Tribunal and had escaped its attention; the Tribunal allowed a rectification application and the High Court reversed it. The Supreme Court restored the Tribunal, holding that "when prejudice results from an order attributable to the Tribunal's mistake, error or omission, then it is the duty of the Tribunal to set it right", and that "atonement to the wronged party by the court or Tribunal for the wrong committed by it has nothing to do with the concept of inherent power to review". The Supreme Court went further in Saurashtra Kutch Stock Exchange on 15 September 2008, holding that non-consideration of a decision of the jurisdictional High Court or of the Supreme Court can itself be a mistake apparent from the record. Hold this against Ramesh Electric and the distinction is workable: an argument the Tribunal heard and rejected is not a mistake apparent, but a binding decision that was on the record and was simply not noticed is.
A decision handed down after the Tribunal's order is a different question, and the High Courts have split on it. The Allahabad High Court in CIT v Motilal Duli Chand, on 3 July 2014, held that where the Tribunal decided on the strength of an earlier Supreme Court decision and the Supreme Court has since read the law differently, "a mistake arising as a result of a subsequent interpretation of law by the Supreme Court would constitute 'a mistake apparent from the records'", and that a rectification application is maintainable. The Bombay High Court has gone the other way, twice in 2025. In Vaibhav Maruti Dombale on 12 September 2025 it held that "a subsequent ruling of a Court cannot be a ground for invoking the provisions of Section 254(2)", endorsed the Mumbai Tribunal's reasoning in ANI Integrated Services, distinguished Saurashtra Kutch as a case where the decision overlooked had already been delivered, and quashed the recall. It repeated the holding in Goldy Precision Stampings on 13 October 2025, where the Tribunal had recalled an order on the strength of Checkmate Services: the original order had followed the law as it stood, so there was no error apparent on the record. If you are before the Mumbai benches, a recall on a later Supreme Court decision is not available.
On what the Tribunal may actually do: it may correct the order, it may recall part of it, and it may recall the whole of it. A Full Bench of the Delhi High Court settled the last point in Lachman Dass Bhatia Hingwala on 24 December 2010, holding that the Tribunal "can recall its order in entirety if it is satisfied that prejudice has resulted to the party which is attributable to the tribunal's mistake, error or omission and which error is a manifest error", and that the earlier Delhi line beginning with K.L. Bhatia does not lay down the correct statement of the law. Reliance Telecom and Lachman Dass sit together: total recall is not forbidden, but the ground for it must be the Tribunal's own manifest error causing prejudice, not a fresh view of the merits. Where an appeal was disposed of ex parte the route is different and better. The Delhi High Court held in Pradeep Kumar Jindal, on 19 February 2021, that Rule 24 of the Income-tax (Appellate Tribunal) Rules 1963 obliges the Tribunal to decide the appeal on merits even if the appellant does not appear, that a dismissal for non-prosecution is void, and that the proviso to Rule 24 prescribes no limitation — so a restoration application is not caught by the six months in section 254(2).
The department may apply, and nobody's delay can be condoned. The sub-section names the assessee or the Assessing Officer, so the Revenue is an applicant in its own right; the fifty-rupee fee proviso bites only on an application by an assessee. What neither side gets is an extension. Section 253(5) expressly lets the Tribunal admit a late appeal for sufficient cause; section 254 has no equivalent, and the Mumbai Tribunal relied on exactly that contrast in Hita Land when it held that the six-month period applies to orders passed before 1 June 2016 as well, the section drawing no distinction, and that it had no power to condone. The Karnataka High Court agreed in Karuturi Global that the Tribunal cannot condone delay beyond six months, but took the view that the remedy then lies in the writ jurisdiction under Articles 226 and 227 — and itself condoned a delay of 497 days, with costs. The Bombay High Court in Leena Power Tech declined to do the same, saying that section 254 contains no provision enabling the Tribunal to condone a delay beyond six months and that sufficient cause would be irrelevant. So: the Tribunal cannot help you, and whether a High Court will is not uniform. One saver does exist for applications straddling the amendment — the Jharkhand High Court held in Kamal Nayan Singh that an application filed before 1 June 2016 is governed by the four-year period then in force and cannot be dismissed under the six-month rule that came in while it was pending.
Do not let the miscellaneous application eat your appeal. Section 260A(2)(a) gives 120 days from the date the Tribunal's order is received to appeal to the High Court, and nothing in the Act stops or extends that period while a miscellaneous application is pending. What exists is section 260A(2A), inserted by the Finance Act 2010 with retrospective effect from 1 October 1998, under which the High Court may admit a late appeal if satisfied there was sufficient cause. Reliance Telecom is the cautionary tale: the assessee had appealed to the High Court against the original order, withdrew that appeal once the Tribunal recalled it, and when the Supreme Court restored the original order it had to be given six weeks' liberty to appeal again without objection as to limitation. In Dombale the Bombay High Court likewise left the Revenue to its section 260A remedy against the original order after quashing the recall. Nor does a pending application suspend the Assessing Officer's obligations. Section 153(5) requires effect to be given to an order under section 254 within three months from the end of the month in which the order is received, but that three months is not flat. Two provisos, which the department's footnote credits to the Finance Act 2017 with retrospective effect from 1 June 2016, qualify it. Where it is not possible for the Assessing Officer to comply within the period for reasons beyond his control, the Principal Commissioner or Commissioner may, on a written request from him, allow an additional period of six months. And where the Tribunal's order requires verification of an issue by way of a document from the assessee or anyone else, or an opportunity of being heard is to be given, the effect order runs instead on the period in section 153(3). That period is nine months from the end of the financial year in which the section 254 order is received — read as twelve months, under a proviso to sub-section (3), where the order is received on or after 1 April 2019, which is every order a reader today could be holding. If the Tribunal's order is recalled, the appeal revives and is decided afresh under section 254(1), and it is that order the Assessing Officer then has to work from.
Six months is short and it is unforgiving. An appeal under section 253 can be admitted late for sufficient cause; a miscellaneous application cannot. If you let the period go because you were waiting to see whether the Assessing Officer would give effect to the order, or because counsel was considering an appeal, the Tribunal will refuse to look at the mistake however obvious it is, and your only route is a writ petition in a High Court that may or may not entertain it.
The other half of the risk is using section 254(2) for the wrong thing. An application that is really an invitation to reconsider the merits will be dismissed, and in the meantime the 120 days for a section 260A appeal will have run. Reliance Telecom ends with a party who had a good order recalled, lost it again in the Supreme Court, and had to be rescued by a special liberty to re-file the appeal it had withdrawn.
A binding decision that covers my point was never considered when my order was passed. Is that a mistake apparent from the record?
My file has been moved to another city under section 127. The order says only that it was for facility of investigation, and nobody has given me the reasons. Is that enough?
The order under section 148A(d) rejects everything I said and the section 148 notice has followed. Can I take it straight to the High Court?
My settlement application was admitted years before the Commission passed its final order — can it charge me section 234B interest for that whole period, and reopen the settled order later to add interest it forgot?
The Commissioner has cancelled my trust's registration because some corpus donations are said to be bogus — can he do that when the money was actually spent on the trust's objects?
Can I go straight to the High Court against an income-tax order instead of filing the statutory appeal?
A search was made on someone else and my papers were found. From which date are my six years counted - the search, or when my Assessing Officer got the papers?
I claimed the expenditure under one head before the Assessing Officer, lost, and now want the Tribunal to allow it under a different head. Can the Tribunal do that, or am I stuck with the plea I chose?
Every page in this library links to what it was written from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
